


blessed with bad eyes

by WitchyBee



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Glasses, Hopeful Ending, Hospitals, Minor/background Jonmartin, Season/Series 04, Self-Indulgent, Self-Worth Issues, Trauma, Visually Impaired Jonathan Sims
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-19 07:04:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22240522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WitchyBee/pseuds/WitchyBee
Summary: “I guess you won’t be needing glasses anyway,” Basira continues. “Since you’re...whatever it is you are.”Oh, if only the Beholdingwerethat helpful.
Relationships: Basira Hussain & Jonathan Sims, Jonathan Sims & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, Melanie King & Jonathan Sims
Comments: 42
Kudos: 693





	blessed with bad eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Glory by Radical Face.

After six months (dead) in a coma, Jon wakes up more or less all right. Unsettlingly so, apparently. He feels...clearer, somehow. Which is the only thing that’s clear. Jon finds himself strangely grateful that he can’t see the disappointed expression on Georgie’s face before she walks out of his hospital room.

“Basira,” he says, voice raspy from disuse, “Where are my glasses?”

“I don’t know. There was no sign of them when they found you. Probably got lost in the explosion.”

“Right.”

He recalls so vividly his grandmother’s exasperated sigh when he’d return home, glasses broken, after yet another altercation with some bully. Jon can almost hear it. In any case, he adds his glasses to the ever-expanding mental list of things he’s lost, which now also comprises: his clothes, his flat, the trust of his friends, and whatever had still remained of his humanity.

“I guess you won’t be needing glasses anyway,” Basira continues. “Since you’re...whatever it is you are.”

“The Archivist,” he says automatically. That is what’s different now, isn’t it? Jon made a choice and he’s...become something else. It runs so much deeper than simply his eyes. “But, actually—"

Before he can explain further, Basira leaves Jon alone to read the statement she brought for him. So, he reads it and—well, that’s exactly the point. He _reads_ it perfectly fine, even without his glasses. The Beholding’s latest unwanted boon shouldn’t come as too great a shock, Jon supposes, considering he once read a statement written entirely in French. This change in his eyesight is new, though, and, he quickly discovers, highly conditional. What good is an Archivist who can’t record statements, after all?

Even after Jon is discharged from the hospital, he just sort of fails to mention that he does still need glasses otherwise. Basira's mourning Daisy, she has enough on her plate right now, and is rarely in the Institute. Melanie wants very much to kill him. And Martin is—

Well, it feels like such a small and insignificant thing in the face of potentially apocalyptic threats.

* * *

Daisy pauses The Archers. Truth be told, he likes listening to it. Yes, it’s terrible, but unlike most stories he encounters, ultimately harmless. Nothing to see.

Jon glances up from the document he’s been reading. It isn’t a statement. Basira is looking into the Dark’s ritual, but follow-up and additional research on anything else falls almost exclusively to him these days.

“You’re squinting,” Daisy says. His muscles reflexively tense up at the note of accusation in her tone. It strikes something deep and fearful within him; he remembers walking through a forest, the cold metal of her gun pressed into his back. Jon reminds himself that she's changed. They both have.

“Just a—headache,” he explains, massaging his temples. It isn’t completely untrue.

“Hmm. Where are your glasses?” she asks.

Despite all these new abilities he’s recently acquired, lying is not among them.

He sighs. “Great Yarmouth. Buried in the rubble of a wax museum.” Jon winces at his own poor choice of words.

“You do need them though, yeah? Or did you get some kind of eldritch Lasik?”

“No, that costs extra.”

“And you decided not to tell anyone. Why?”

(Because it was easier, Jon doesn't say, to hide away in his office and read statements, to do what he's meant for. And because he honestly never imagined anyone would care. Perhaps they’d be right not to.)

“It, uh, didn’t seem important. I can still—I’m useful,” he says. “Please don’t tell Basira about this. I don’t want to give her any more reason to distrust me.”

“Might be too late for that, but...all right.” A brief silence settles between them. Then she adds, earnest, “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean for it to sound like an interrogation.”

“I know,” he says quietly.

* * *

To her credit, Daisy keeps her word. She does not tell Basira anything.

“Jon, you idiot,” Melanie declares, barging into his office.

“Hello to you too, Melanie.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

Shit. He tries to Know; it’s not his proudest moment and it doesn’t work anyway. The Eye seems rather uninclined to help with this one, of course.

“Four,” Jon guesses.

“Not even close. The correct answer was two, and a knife. Relax,” she says, setting the knife down on his desk. “Helen thought it’d be funny.”

Not particularly reassuring, that. He attempts a laugh.

“Jesus,” she mutters. Melanie sounds frustrated, although not actively homicidal. An encouraging development. “We are all trapped in a place that was literally created to make people miserable, and you’re just letting yourself suffer even more! Maybe you think you deserve it—I don’t care. Make a choice. Fight back. Or at the very least replace your fucking glasses.”

There's nothing more to be said. She storms out.

(Soon Melanie will make a choice of her own, and fight back in a different way. Jon wishes he had even half her courage.)

* * *

As a child, Jon failed the vision test in primary school. His grandmother gave him an odd look when he told her, a look he would come to know quite well—the mix of grief and love that meant she was remembering his father.

So, while he can’t stand eye exams, he is unfortunately quite familiar with this process. Jon hates being poked and prodded by the doctors. Always has. He hates waiting most of all, though. It’s been nearly half an hour since his scheduled appointment time.

There is a very good reason Jon barely leaves the archive anymore. Someone in the optometrist's waiting room has a statement. He can feel it; he can see it as well, in every sense of the word. Jon sees the person clearly, thrown into sharp relief by the dull and blurry surroundings of the clinic. Compulsion rises in his throat like bile. He wants—He wants—

He just wants new glasses, damn it.

“I think we need to leave,” he whispers urgently. “I can’t be here.”

“Oh no you don’t,” Daisy replies, firm but kind. “We didn’t come all this way just to give up now. Besides, I’m not going anywhere until my legs stop shaking. Unless a monster shows up.”

(A monster is already here.)

“Okay.”

Jon is aware that he should stop staring at the stranger, and closes his eyes. It doesn’t really help. Daisy has statements, too, of course, stories from her Section 31 days. But she’s already bound to the Institute, to the Eye.

“Focus on me, Jon. Listen to the quiet.”

“I—I don’t know if I can.”

Daisy reaches out, intertwining their fingers. She squeezes his hand gently and Jon squeezes back. It’s a holdover from the coffin. A small gesture of comfort and grounding which affirms they are not alone.

He’s changed, irrevocably so. They both have. There has to be some part of himself that isn’t wholly the Archivist. He wants to be more than this hunger. This is what Jon chooses, if only because it makes him feel a little bit more human.

(Later, standing on a desolate stretch of shoreline in the Lonely, he knows it’s all worth it.

“I see _you_ , Jon,” says Martin.

And Jon sees him, too.)

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Tumblr @podcastenthusiast.


End file.
